DITA

Darwin Information Typing Architecture

Documentation is the result of assembling different content from distinct sources and various stakeholders. These sources could be business systems such as ERP or CRM applications, document management systems, dedicated production systems, cloud, or external third-party systems. Achieving time-to-market, compliance objectives and increasing documentation productivity and quality require an efficient modular content framework. This framework must support reuse of information, consistency throughout the production chain, and multi-format diffusion.

Acsone considers DITA as the most suitable XML standard to setup and organize enterprise business documents.

DITA identifies two basic concepts: the Topic and the Map.

The DITA Topic is used to store typed information

and the DITA Map is used to arrange topics within a hierarchy.

The DITA components exploit the full potential of XML-based standards and tools to bring efficient and elegant solutions to critical business and financial pain points such as complex collaborative process (multi-sources, multi-users, multi-organizations), multilingual document management (consistency, versioning, aggregation), multi-channel dissemination and processes monitoring (audits, quality, compliancy, dashboards). Within such an architecture, DITA is the piece that mainly helps modeling and authoring business and technical content. Acsone brings its unique expertise to exploit the results of DITA much further in the value chain.

KEY POINTS

Specialization: DITA can be easily customized to manage specific domains such as quality management, compliance, or any company-specific business domain. Whatever your sectors, your company will be able to produce its business documents with a DITA framework.

Proven technology: Many corporate enterprises are using DITA to manage sensitive information, providing the necessary track record toward validation and adoption. In June 2005, DITA becomes an OASIS norm. IBM, CISCO, INTEL, Microsoft are members of the DITA OASIS committee.

Scalable technology: Product offerings that provide solutions for large production environments are numerous. Open-source toolkits are readily available to accelerate the introduction of these technologies into your company.